Chameleon's Morrow
by Sid Prise
Summary: The first three chapters of this fanfic epic, available on . An elfin lass, Aurelia, begins her adventuring life in the world of D&D, advanced the centuries to the Industrial Revolution. She tastes of love, magic, and war . . .


Chapter the First: _From the Cradle . . ._

A girl was born without a name. This was only proper, for who can name anyone? Many peoples in the world, the humans, the dwarves, the hobbits and gnomes--all the peoples of T'luria--name their children at birth, or shortly thereafter. But the Elves of the Great Western Forests, that vast sylvan expanse impenetrable to all but those who are invited in, do not name their children at birth; rather, they call them "elflings" or "little ones" or "blood of future times"--many terms, many references, none of which are thought of as anything like a specific or proper "name." A personality forms only gradually for elves, just as for all the creatures of the world. For the elves, the idea of issuing a name to a child before she develops a personality is almost considered an invitation to bad luck. The dwarves, opposite to the elves in so many ways, assign their children names at birth, names not unique to them, but rather names handed down from darkest antiquity, then reused over and over in subsequent generations; the clan patriarch or matriarch handles the assignment of this name, judges whether the child remains worthy of that name, and may sometimes decide to revoke it--the greatest disgrace among the many meted out in the shame-ridden dwarfish culture to those who cannot or will not conform to its demands. Other races, such as the hobbits or the humans, are not quite so formal as the dwarves with their names; but the principle--the "assigning" of names without any thought to an individual's true personality, much less her right to name herself--is the same.

As an elfchild grows, she comes to have many informal names--"pet" names--given her by her intimates growing up. But these many pet names are, like the first general euphemisms, only temporary, "working titles." A person's true name, the one which becomes hers for life, must eventually be _chosen by the person herself_. The first real ceremony of her life, one whose cast influences all subsequent ceremonies she will celebrate, is the ceremony by which she chooses her adult name, proclaims it to her elfin community, and to all the world beyond. After this Declaration Ceremony, the elfin adult can choose whether and when she will respond to the pet names of the hundred-odd years of her childhood. Sometimes, good friends might call her by a nickname for the rest of her life, as an expression of the special bond between them. Other times, a nickname might be used to mock her, a reminder that people knew her "way back when," to cut her down to size if she acts in ways they deem too pretentious or haughty. But for the most part, her chosen name is considered her "true" name, becoming an integral part of how she relates to everything else--her spirituality, her politics, her magic-use, her relationship style, the way she makes love. An elf must choose. The freedom to choose, and the _duty_ to choose, is finally what makes an elf an elf.

The girl at birth did not therefore have a name. And this was only proper. She lived the first thirty-five years of her life in the Great Western Forest, the Elfish Forest, near an oblong circle of naturally camouflaged treehouses called "Rasillon." The girl grew both quickly and slowly. Bright and precocious in temperament, she mastered early the complexities of the elfish tongue, all its many voices and tenses and subtly nuanced inflections. Indeed, she seemed early on to have a facility for languages generally, and her attentive elders allowed her to study the other tongues they knew, ranging from that delicate relative of the Elfish, known as Sylvan, language of the pixies and nymphs and dryads of the Forest, to the harsher syllables of Continental Common (the humanish tongue), and the even harsher patois of the dwarves and the orcs. Yet she was slow and awkward in developing her body, learning to speak long before she could walk, learning to read and write before she'd mastered swimming or climbing or dancing. Though she would one day become quite proficient in the elfish arts of archery and swordsmanship, as well as in the unarmed elfin martial arts, her first attempts in these areas were dubious and faltering. In these first years, it was the cerebral rather than the physical which marked her. This led to the first pet name she ever carried after the generic "elfling" and "little one." This was "H'a-aad," which means something loosely translatable as "thinking energy" or "the energy of the head/mind." (H'a-aad is often nuanced as something somewhat negative, as in "thinking too much.") But this name didn't stick much past her fortieth year, when she began to interact with playmates beyond her parents and caretakers. As she spoke more, and too learned to dance, H'a-aad came to have other nicknames; and by her fifty-fifth year, she'd begun to wonder for the first time what name she might eventually choose for herself.

Her child names were as varied and numerous as a gnome's by her seventies, half a dozen if one; but none of them did she really like. "Ama" was the one she liked best, the elfish word for "flower" or "blossom." Her playmate Tariil started calling her "Tlalaa" around seventy-nine or eighty, which means something between "teasing" and "enslaving"--a synonym in elfish for the alluring but most often denying water-nymphs rumored to live deep in the forest, living to taunt and torment hapless boys and girls in the woodlands who they made fools of by eliciting and then cruelly ridiculing their unrequited attraction. Another playmate, who early on took the name "Aristraana," liked to call her "Kiir'a," meaning something akin to "precious gemstone." Her father and mother usually referred to her as "Shar-shelevu"--the opening line of a famous prayer. This multi-layered term connoted at once their prayer for her health and wellbeing, their prayer of thanksgiving to the Moon-God Corellon and the Forest-Goddess Ehlonna for the gift of her life, as well as their prayer to save her from her recklessness and irresponsibility, a kind of playful admonishment, among other meanings. This name the girl liked the least.

She'd told her Uncle Aurel of the name she wanted to take during one of his infrequent but much anticipated visits. It was a feminization of his own name--"Aurelia"--and he early on granted her the respect of calling her by it, even though it would be more than a quarter century till she reached her majority and officially claimed it as her own. Aurel was by far her favorite relative, indeed her favorite person in the whole world. A dashing elfish dandy, attired always in a deep olive frockcoat, with tufts of pink lace round his neck and cuffs, wine-red deerskin britches snaking down to shiny pointed sable thigh-boots, brandishing a perennial elfish rapier and a dwarfish one-shot sidearm pistol, dangling gracefully from a wide, platinum-embroidered crimson sash--Aurel was a great adventurer. Despite his eccentric, even delicate appearance, he'd fiercely battled against the most ferocious monsters living, as well as many that were undead, over the fantastic course of his five-century career. He'd traveled far from the Rasillon of his birth, far indeed from the vast Elfish Forests, which he told her as a small child was but a small corner of a much vaster Continent. T'luria--the name the elves give to the World--was much more than the woods around them, more even than the vast Continent beyond; a whole other hemisphere was awash in Ocean, with a hundred-odd archipelagos each with a thousand-odd islands. Aurel had traveled to many, many of these, too, along with his trekking round the various climes and cultures of the Continent, all the while penetrating the most forbidding dungeons in search of the rarest hidden treasures, meeting many different kinds of people, learning their many tongues, and coming to know their many Gods.

Aurelia came to be raised more by Aurel and his tales of adventure than by her own staid parents or any of the homebody elders of her tiny elfin thorp. It was in her conversations with him, shared whilst sitting girlishly on his knee in the parlor of her parents' treehouse over the half-century of her childhood, that the growing girl learnt what the world outside her village really was, and who she wanted to be in relation to it. When Aurel was reported lost to the world, his soul and body disappearing into the astral ether following his last, ill-fated quest to locate an artifact he called "the Codex," she vowed solemnly to take her name in his honor, and one day complete his quest. She would find and secure the Great Book, read and learn its spells, and thus "emancipate Creation from its Creators" (as far as she could reckon what her uncle's cryptic words meant). The half-formed, half-remembered words she'd heard from Aurel's lips, all his tales, all the legends of bygone times and exotic places, remained in Aurelia's consciousness as she grew into adulthood; but it would be many, many years till she put it all together, let alone attain the insights his mysterious words foretold.

Her playmates in the thorp were few, but very dear to her. Aristraana and Tariil were perhaps her dearest. At first, it was Aristraana who was the closer. Aurelia loved Aristraana at first like a younger sister, though their families were far from blood-related. Whilst Aurelia's lineage could be traced back some ten elfin generations to Rasillon's shifting and meandering locale, making ever widening circles round the ring of trees where it stood today, Aristraana's family had been in residence but a thousand years or so, which to the elves made them newcomers. Some ten years Aurelia's junior, Aristraana was early on even more beautiful than she was. Both girls had by then long, luxurious raven hair flowing far past their shoulders; both girls had the willowy, petite frames which would define their elfin adulthood; both had alabaster, smooth and perfect skin; each had eyes of the most brilliant elfin green. But Aristraana was fuller, rounder than Aurelia's sharp and angular features. Aurelia's face was sharply crafted, almost mask-like in comparison to Aristraana's generous, gentle oval. Aristraana's eyes were dazzling, with flecks of gold and crimson fire along the edges of her verdant irises; Aurelia's eyes were of a less lustrous quality, a purer green, more like the chartreuse to olive spectrum found in the grasses and leaves and mosses around them, more like the earth. While both girls were certainly the prettiest by far of their generation in Rasillon, and all their peers and elders anticipated their growing into adults of the most arresting beauty, Aurelia had a more grounded, more ordinary beauty than her younger companion. Aristraana, in contrast, seemed otherworldly; it was reflected in the haunting timbre of her voice, in the cloudlike billowiness of her curvy features, in the spectral iridescence of her eyes.

Aristraana's otherworldliness tantalized Aurelia, made her feel a queer longing, a strange possessiveness, even an envy. Aristraana early on sensed this, though she did not understand it. It flattered her, though, this obsessive affection, this almost hero-worship, and as the years passed it tended to make her feel a vanity in dealing with her once sisterly friend. She grinned with youthful, wispy cruelty at Aurelia when they talked, touching her arm, her hand, her cheek--then playfully pulling away. When Aurelia touched her back, Aristraana smiled coyly, and coyly demanded why. She knew she was wanted, sensed her friend's burning, amusing desire; as the years passed, she even toyed with the idea of letting herself be had. But she always pulled away just shy of consummation.

They sat under the dense, leafless branches of a long-dead tree they called Grandfather, by a swiftly splashing stream they called their Elder Sister, an hour's walk from the settlement down a secret, meandering path. It was a hot, sticky afternoon, high summer in the forest, and both of them were sticky with beading sweat. Aurelia perspired more than Aristraana, who seemed rather to glow. Aristraana was more an elf of Corellon, more airy and ethereal, like the cool, pale moon in a crystal, cloudless sky. Aurelia was an elf of Ehlonna, earthy, grounded in the forest's steamy reality, with all its heavy, inescapable heat, all its thick smells of rot and clay mingling with the more flowery aromas wafting through the breezes. Aurelia smelled of pepper, of alluring, acrid spice, her sweaty scent hanging round her like a preternatural aura. Aristraana's scent was barely detectable, no matter how much moisture soaked her brow. She felt herself a celestial, an angel, pristine and perfect, not even her sweat able to ruin her airy beauty. She chuckled at Aurelia, and asked if she were human.

"Why?" Aurelia demanded.

"You smell like Tariil," Aristraana teased. "That half-human, greasy boy."

Aurelia pulled away, angrily; but then, Aristraana kissed her.

Worlds opened up in that kiss. Aurelia tasted a savor she'd never known, and felt her aura mingling with her tormentor, her obsession, her idol--the boundaries between them suddenly, utterly evaporating. Aristraana enjoyed the taste, too, breathed in Aurelia's peppery essence, and though she would not admit it to her, found it as entrancing as Elfin Wine. She pulled away and chuckled icily.

"Have you ever kissed anyone before, Kiir'a?"

"Well . . . no."

"_I _have."

"Oh, yes?"

"Oh, yes. I kissed the Tlalaa."

"The Tlalaa? The water-nymph?"

"Yes. Just a fortnight ago. After the Solstice Festival. I wandered away from the elders, having a little more than my share of my great auntie's wine--she makes it from scratch, you know."

"Yes, I know. I've had many a glass--years before you, elfling."

"Yes, yes. I wandered off, into the deep woods--just some paces from this very spot--and I heard the Tlalaa singing!"

Aurelia squinted in something between jealousy and fear.

"What did it sound like?"

"The singing? Like what a million shards of magical glass, crashing crystalline though the vortex, would sound like if _they _were singing. Chiming. Breaking. _Like my heart_ . . ."

Aristraana chuckled gaily at herself.

"Go on."

"Well, Kiir'a, I followed that beautiful, frightening sound. I forded the stream--this stream, our Elder Sister--and struck even deeper into the forest. I thought I'd get lost; I know that's one of the Tlalaa's games--to _lure _you deep into the woods, so you'll lose your way. And then when you realize you're lost, and that wave of panic comes over you--then, Tlalaa's laughter rings from the Fey's dimension, and you're left there, lost and foolish."

"But, you didn't get lost."

"No. I was clever--_cleverer _than Tlalaa! I dropped seeds as I went, so I could follow the trail back to Rasillon whenever I chose. . . . I came upon the little pond where Tlalaa's portal merges with this plane--and I _saw _who was singing!"

"What did the Tlalaa look like?"

"Oh, just what you'd expect, Kiir'a. Tlalaa is--_beautiful_ . . ."

Aurelia listened with envy as Aristraana described Tlalaa's perfect, delicate, androgynous body, with golden, shimmering skin, eyes of brilliant crimson fire, hair of foresty greens mingling into sky blues, with all the entrancing beauty of a perfect girl, a perfect boy, mingling with subtlest nuances of a dozen other unknowable genders. Aristraana found the Tlalaa laying invitingly on a lily pad, which hovered on a cloud of mist, the shimmering, chiming music almost visible, almost palpable, all mingling deliciously in the aromatic fog. Tlalaa's golden leg was stretched above Tlalaa's luxuriously reclining body, and in Tlalaa's toes was a bunch of ruby-red grapes. Somehow, Tlalaa could bend so that the grapes would fall, one by one, into lips and tongue most delicious. Aristraana came upon Tlalaa before Tlalaa knew she approached; and this is when she stole a kiss from those perfect lips, tasted that warm, winy tongue.

"What did the Tlalaa do?" Aurelia asked aghast.

Aristraana beamed with pride.

"Tlalaa," she grinned, "was not pleased. Tlalaa most always decides when and if Tlalaa will be kissed--and as all the epics tell us, Tlalaa only lets you kiss those lips if it somehow can be twisted round to amuse Tlalaa. But _I _kissed the Tlalaa, and then _I _laughed! Tlalaa tried to get me to reach for a bite of the grapes, so they could be pulled away from me and I'd end up splashing down into the pond as Tlalaa disappeared--my clothes drenched and soiled and ruined!--but I just traipsed off, following my seed-trail back to my own warm, dry bed. Ha ha!!"

Aurelia shared in the triumph. Suddenly, her own envy, her own longing and frustration--none of it mattered. She sublimated it all by sharing a laugh at the temptress and trickster, who had been made to feel all her own unrequited, foolish frustrations--being made an utter fool by a mere elfchild! She found herself loving Aristraana, as if for the first time.

But the lusty, dizzy nausea returned again and again, that thing which some call being "spellbound"--the anger, the frustration, the hopeless fantasies--and the weird _enjoyment _of it all.

Aurelia's affections for her friend were always mixed with the jealousies, the envies, and for a number of years before she'd reached eighty years of age, she spent it obsessed with Aristraana, who was to her the whole world. When they came together, it was always with a sense that Aristraana was prettier, _better _than Aurelia, and it was such that the lasses were rivals as much as friends.

Yet, Aurelia had a gift, one that came to her almost as if a dark vision, or a spectral haunting that could not be exorcised: she had the gift of sorcery. At first, it was as a madness in her, and most of the youths around Aurelia shrank from her in fear, leaving Aurelia isolated and lonely for a long part of her earlier years. Aristraana did not shrink from her; indeed, for a time, Aristraana was the only friend Aurelia had, who stayed close, terrified and fascinated with the power her friend had over the world, the very air round her shimmering with energy, tongues of fire sometimes appearing above her head, shooting from her fingers—with or without her willing it. But as Aurelia grew older still, she gradually learnt to channel and to shape this energy, to make it do her bidding, instead of being at _its _mercy. And as Aristraana grew with Aurelia, she, too, came to feel a jealousy toward her older friend, for the power she had, for the gift that could be a curse as well, one that Aristraana sometimes longed to be cursed with, too. But sorcery is a natural talent, an inborn gift and curse, and Aurelia could no more explain her sorceress' powers to Aristraana than a poet could explain how to compose, or a tree could explain how to be tall.

Aristraana was attracted to that which frightened her, and a good deal of her love for Aurelia was based in admiration of that which she feared in her. She resented it, too, this power; but she knew that Aurelia for her part resented her, for her beauty, and the queer power that beauty had amongst the elves, amongst the very creatures of the forest and the forces of nature, which Aristraana, even without Aurelia's sorceress' skill, possessed the powers of her charms over. She could call down birds from the trees, bring wild boars and black bears and even the great forest griffins to calmness and gentlest purring. Aurelia found powers equal or exceeding hers, however; she was able to _conjure _such beasts from the ether by her eighties, if only for a time—the illusions powerful enough that the creatures she mimicked would be attracted, or even frightened away, by the sight and sound and smells of her phantom creatures. All in all, it was Aurelia who had the far greater power; though in Aristraana's lovely shadow, Aurelia still most often felt eclipsed.

It made sense that Aristraana's path would take her far out from the settlement, to the mistier parts of the forest, where portals shimmered in rings of stones or lonely, foggy ponds. In a pond one midnight, Aristraana found the being which truly stole her heart, the water-nymph she knew instantly from the epics and legends of her people was called the _Tlalaa._ She'd stolen her kiss from the beauteous androgynous fey, feeling powerful in her seductive power and daring; but within a few seasons, it was Tlalaa that had the upper hand, drawing Aristraana further and further out, keeping her dancing till the dawn for the Tlalaa's own pleasure. After a time, Aurelia rarely saw her young friend. And in that emptiness that came to her, Aurelia turned to her friend Tariil, who had come into an early manhood, and fawned on her in the same manner that she herself had once fawned on Aristraana.

A half-human (what the humans call a "half-elf"), Tariil had grown from a toddler to a near adult in the swift span of but two decades. Aurelia had been a youngster barely more than half a century in the world when a pretty older elfin woman and her young human husband settled into a treehouse on the outer periphery of Rasillon and parented Tariil. But by the time Tariil had reached his nineteenth year, he seemed older than Aurelia. Like most half-elves raised amongst elfinkind, Tariil was awkward and strained in his dealings with his neighbors and peers. He was a little rough around the edges, his command of the complex elfish tongue always a little rudimentary, a little too much like his rather boorish human father, who was aging at an uncannily rapid rate, and yet still was unable to speak well or write with any literacy. Tariil was ashamed of his father, ashamed of himself. And while the elfish culture is a kindly culture, it is also a haughty culture--one which has yet to learn the virtue of inclusiveness. Tariil was a stranger in his own community, despite his having lived there all his life. It seemed the will of the gods that he'd find solace in Aurelia's friendship, just as she was losing touch with Aristraana. They found one another at just the right time, sharing their loneliness and in one another, triumphing over it . . .

Tariil was a pretty boy by his half-human adolescence, with long, sandy-brown hair flowing down almost to his waist, a face crafted like Aurelia's, a sharp yet gentle point to his little ears. But there was something hard to quantify yet definitely amiss in his appearance, something harsh about his frame, his face, despite his often elflike beauty. His eyes were not the elfin green, but had a touch of a human brown in them. His body was bigger than seemed natural, taller, stockier. His face broke out into pimply acne early on, then into an increasingly dense beard which took him years to learn to properly trim and style. All this made Aurelia less envious of him than she sometimes was with Aristraana, less threatened by his beauty which, though certainly well-formed by his maturity, was less the kind of beauty which eclipsed her own. She found her love for him warmer, more equal, than her worshipful attentions to Aristraana, something less like the coldly beautiful aspect of Corellon, the Great God of the Moon, and more like the warmer, more sensual embrace of the Forest-Goddess, Mother Ehlonna. This was how Aurelia thought of it in those days . . .

Tariil came to be closer to her than her other friend had come. Tariil was more available to her, more mundane, more like the earth. Their spirits were kindred, two elfish children of Ehlonna. In Tariil, Aurelia realized her own ordinariness, and rather than attempt to distance herself from it, to cultivate artifice and strive for the airiness of Aristraana, Aurelia realized that there was nothing wrong in being ordinary. A part of that arrogance she'd had for so many years, that pride both wounded and reasserted, lost and won and lost again in her dance with Aristraana, came to dissipate now as she came to know Tariil's humanish sweaty sinews, his grounded, natural passions, as akin to her own. She learned to love his smell, earthy, even a little dirty at times, but in that stimulating, stirring down deep, a tremor in her alluring despite any pretensions of cleanliness and decorum. And she came to cherish her own smell, mingling into it.

"I love you, Ama-Tlalaa," he called her in his own pet name for her, celebrating her beauty as both the naturalness of a flower and the spectral vision of the fey. "I vow to you, I shall always be at your side. As soon as you declare yourself—let us from here, and travel the world together! Let us be the great adventurers your lost uncle was, Ama-Tlala'a!" Then, in Highest Elfin, his tongue straining over the nuances of the complex tongue which took a century to properly learn, the half-human boy of twenty or twenty-two invited: "Wilt thou cometh from hence with me, my _aalura'_love?"

Aurelia smiled, feeling beautiful, more beautiful for being viewed as beautiful in his worshipful eyes. "Aye, my _aalura'T'ariil. _'Twould be my honor, to be honored thus by thee. . . . Let us adventure together—as all the heroes and heroines of Old!!"

And she kissed him, and pledged anew their lifelong friendship.

Many years in their secluded elfin wood the young elves danced together, with all the envies and longings and then the compersions and fulfillments that elfish people explored in their coming to the century of their maturity. The friendships forged in the cradle years of their existences would bond them forever as comrades and companions in the years that followed.

The elves have no god or goddess of Love. In the elfish way, it is not to a god or goddess, but to the loved one alone, that you give your worship. Thus, through all her trials and tribulations with them, Aurelia never prayed or beseeched any Cosmic Lover for help or understanding of Aristraana or Tariil or the others in the community she fell into deep attractions for. No word exists in the Elfish, be it the High tongue or the Ordinary, in any of the dialects round the vast Western Forests, that was simply "love" or "lover" in the way those words exist in the Common tongue. The term "_aaluran_," which personified is the god or goddess of love in such pantheons as the human and the hobbit, is unintelligible if not connected with other words, at best a slang term of bastardized, Ordinary Elfish which those unfamiliar with the tongue might sometimes mistakenly employ. You speak properly of a lover always in conjunction with her _name_, with the implication that no "love" or "lover" is ever the same as another; the individual loved one, and your relation to her, is utterly unique--never having been before, and never to occur again.

"Aristraana" and "Tariil" came to be inflected in the subtlest lilt by Aurelia over the course of the seasons to reflect the many different concepts that hung on those names, those _persons_, in her passionate, ever-changing relationship with them. These inflections are too subtle to be conveyed in the alphabetic lettering of Common, or indeed in the runic lettering of the dwarves, the gnomes, or (certainly) the orcs. The closest such graphologies come to expressing such inflective subtleties is by employing symbols outside their lexicons. So, the best that can be said here is that, over the course of the seasons of Aurelia's passions for Aristraana, then later Tariil, she called them A'ristra'ana, and then Aristr'aan'a, while Tariil she called T'ariil, but only much later Ta'riil--and certainly never with him did she say Tarii'l. Tarii'l was inconceivable; and for this, Aurelia was forever glad. The last lilt round the final vowel of Aristraana, which she never used with Tariil's last consonant, was the source of much pain, frustration, even at times despair. It was something that Aurelia hated her friend for at times. And it would only be many years later that those hatreds would be sublimated with the greater availability and maturity of their adult connection. Only then could that final inflection be forever forgotten, and Aristraana become A'ristraana in truth.

Tariil remained for Aurelia someone she could touch, someone who was familiar to her, warmly human and grounding in a way Aurelia found difficult to explain. Tariil she worshiped, but only in the most general sense. Aristraana, meanwhile, Aurelia worshiped with the distance of the moon, after whose blood she no doubt traced her elusive, otherworldly spirit. As she loved her, her perceptions of her remained of one beneath, far, far beneath, as herself looking to the heavens. It was only after she'd grown much older and wiser, and gentler too, that Aurelia ever began to touch her in the way she'd long touched Tariil.

The object of love is never so simply stated as "love-object" in the Elfish; always, always, the changing affections, the hatreds and the lusts, the possessiveness and the compersion, and finally the mature, selfless giving and grateful receiving--these can only be truly conveyed in the Name. The Name is the best way any sentient of any language can hope to grasp the inner mystery of an entity that is not oneself. And Elfish, perhaps the most _human _language (to use the bastardized generality that word connotes in the Common tongue), is unparalleled by any other in helping with the movement of tongue and teeth and breath to reach for that unnameable truth the many changing Names but reflect. That unnameable can never be said, or even understood; beyond logic, beyond words, it can only ever be felt, and _known . . ._

By the time her eighty-ninth year rolled around, Aurelia had nearly forgotten about Aristraana, engulfed in the rapture of Tariil. Aristraana had been swept away in the half-requited attractions she had for the water-nymph Tlalaa. Aristraana had left her old friends years ago to dance with the Tlalaa, hardly ever seen by anyone after a time. So, it was almost startling when she returned unexpectedly to the circle of the settlement one dusky twilit summer evening, and hailed Aurelia as if no time at all had passed.

"Where have you been, sister?" Aurelia asked her.

Aristraana smiled a calm, contemplative smile, one of peace.

"I've been purging myself, my Kiir'a," she said. "Purging myself of my curse."

"The Tlalaa?"

"The same. I've been claiming my own over these last years, Kiir'a. I've been coming to a victory in our war of love and hate."

"Aristr'aana, don't you think you'd be better off just forgetting that creature? Your life has been halted, your growth arrested. That creature is just a trap for you. Your pursuit of it--win or lose--is a slavery. You're becoming one of those characters out of our legends; a star-crossed, lovesick fool, ever pining for some sparkly specter that is ever just beyond your reach."

"I know. I know, my Kiir'a. But, tonight I--I--will you come with me tonight?"

"Come with you where?"

"To the pond. To the portal. I plan to make my break with the Tlalaa--once and for all time."

"If you didn't go to the pond anymore, you would have made your break with that trickster temptress long ago."

"Yes. Yes, indeed. . . . But, will you come?"

Aurelia breathed. She looked across the clearing, to the assembled elves beginning to share their lyric songs and their epic tales, reciting together the poetry of their people, with wine and dancing and carefree laughter--as elves had always spent their evenings, from the time when these great and ancient trees were the merest saplings--Ehlonna's seedling garden. Tariil had drunk a tankard of potent barley-wine, a gift of some visiting gnomish bards who had come to trade their tales and wares with the elves of Rasillon, and he lay fast asleep under a shade tree.

"Very well," she promised. "Just this one last time."

"Oh, thank you! Thank you, my Kiir''a!! You're my true sister!!"

And she kissed her, as when they were the youngest children, sisterly on the forehead . . .

Aristraana danced with the Tlalaa for hours that night, as she'd danced with the being every night alone for the past decade, Aurelia watching her fade into mist and then return, only to fade once again. The Tlalaa was as misty, more beautiful than any being Aurelia or Aristraana had ever seen. The nymph, androgynous, elegant, held the same allure for these elfin lasses that they themselves would have held for awkward, boorish human boys and girls; just as elves were seen as almost supernatural in their beauty by non-elves, so Tlalaa was spectral to them. Tlalaa shimmered; Tlalaa teased; Tlalaa beckoned and faded. Aurelia worried for her friend, knowing the Tlalaa was just toying with her, fearing Tlalaa would steal away her heart, and then laughingly break it right in front of her dazzled eyes. Aristraana's plan, whatever it was, seemed a fool's errand; Aurelia began to feel sorry she'd come.

The dance did not fade till the dawn, the earliest, twilit time of dawn, when the moon was still etched in the sky along with the morning sun's first rays, when the borders between the worlds were their most porous. Though she'd been at the periphery, too proud, too frightened to dance with what she knew was but a trickster, Aurelia heard the shimmering crystals of the Tlalaa's music, heard Tlalaa laughing, heard Aristraana's giggles, tickly and delighted. She knew the two were talking; but she could not hear them speak. Was it now? or now? When would Tlalaa finally and utterly ruin the illusion, and leave Aristraana dancing foolish and naked in the dawn dew, breathy, hopeless and spent and all alone after the Tlalaa left her dancing there? Surely, it was almost now. . . .

But then, suddenly, Aristraana turned decidedly away. Was _she _to reject the Tlalaa?? Was she finally to break the illusion, leaving the pixie to weep alone in the portal, as the legends said was the only way to really triumph over such Fey? They would laugh for many years on this, if this were to be the fate of the moment!

Sure enough, Aristraana was coming out of the fog, the pixie spinning in place on the floating lily cloud. Aurelia smiled at her friend's approach, and prepared to join her in a hearty laugh of triumph over the heartbreaker. But when Aristraana came close, her beautiful face, more striking and perfect even than Aurelia's, was still deep in wonderment. She smiled, then, deeply at her friend, as if she meant her to remember the smile, as if it would be eons before she would see her smile again.

"I _love _thee, Kiir'a'rasillon," she called to her as if from a great distance, though she stood right there before her.

"I love _thee_!" she returned, bemused. Aristraana kissed her on her forehead, like a sister. Then, just like that, she, Tlalaa, the mist, the music--all vanished into the ether. Aurelia cried out for Aristraana, cried and cried. Then, she realized.

Tlalaa had taken her precious friend into the Beyond.

She'd never see her young, star-struck friend again.

Time passed, seasons becoming years, years becoming a decade, then halfway through another. Aurelia came to reach and then pass her hundredth birthday, and the forces welling up within her felt like a blossom bursting its bulb. The time of her maturation was upon her, she knew, the time for declaring herself Herself to all the world. She declared her intention to conduct the Declaration Ceremony, telling her parents, the elders, all her neighbors and peers. After this informal declaration, the time to wait was merely the few nights it took before the moon again shone full.

Tariil was happy to witness his friend and lover's declaration of selfhood. A half-human, named by his parents, he was not required (nor, allowed) to name himself as the full-blooded elves did. He was growing older, with all the rapid aging of people with human lineage; a mere thirty-nine years old, his hair was beginning already to grey in parts, parts even thinning, his face just hinting of wrinkling and world-weariness. He was restless, Aurelia knew. He'd spent most of his life waiting for her to declare herself an adult, so she might accompany him on a quest beyond this secluded village, beyond the homey woods of their youth. He wanted adventure. So did she.

They'd spoken much about her need to quest after the Codex, to fulfill her uncle's mission, to avenge his death. They'd spoken of little else, especially in the last few seasons. Tariil's father had grown sickly and aged, the curse of humanity's fleeting relation to Time. Though decades younger than Aurelia herself, the old man was ancient now, closer and closer to death. He'd come to reject in his dotage the religions of the elves he'd adopted when he'd married Tariil's elfin mother, returning instead to the devotions of the humanish Gods--particularly the Sun-God, Pelor, and the Father-of-Time, Cyndor. For Pelor, the old withered man arose before dawn to trudge to a clearing on a hill west of the village, and knelt contemplating the sun all day long, staring straight into it for minutes on end, over and over as it slowly passed over him, and not returning till nightfall. For Cyndor, he begged the sands of the Cosmic Hourglass to move just a little less swiftly, praying sometimes through the night, eyes dead-fixed on the sands of his own little hourglass, vainly willing slowness into the inexorably falling grains.

Tariil was very disturbed by the curse afflicting his father. And as his own body grew more aged by the day, he wondered with dread whether the time was coming when he, too, would lose his mind. Fortunately, his father's agony was relatively brief; the old man expired within the season. He was a mere eighty-one years old . . .

Aurelia gathered her friends, her neighbors, and her relatives together in the clearing in the center of Rasillon, in the silvery light of fullest moonrise, and with the music of lyres and flutes, and the wordless singing of the most ancient elfin chants, haunting melodies that had been sung since before words existed, Aurelia danced in a circle. All elves danced before declaring their names, from the very dawn of history. But each person's dance was always self-taught, improvised; each person had to find her own steps, the first steps on a lifelong journey that was to be uniquely her own. Aurelia danced in a wide arc, which became a circle, counterclockwise. Then, she turned, and danced her dance backward, clockwise. This, she said in her own poetry, was her dance, for it was the full circle that her life had thus far been, and would always be. She was destined, she declared, to always leave her home, to go on farther and farther journeys--only to find herself one day returning, as if for the first time. This dance, she intoned, would take her to places she could not even conceive then, and she called on Corellon to grant her the gift, and allow her to fulfill the duty, of Discovery. However frightening, however foreign, she vowed and begged to experience everything, to know things that no elf yet knew; and she vowed, and beseeched, to return someday, many centuries from now, to share her wisdom with all her countrymen.

Then, in the center of her circle, she raised her voice to the heavens:

"_Hei-Corellon, Hei-Ehlonna, shar-shevelu'ne, Aurel'ia Ama'Rasillon_!!"

[This means: Hail Corellon! Hail Ehlonna! May thou grant me, by thy grace--to be Aurelia Ama'rasillon!!--_Aurel's Child, Rasillon's Flower._]

With that, Aurelia dispensed with a century of pet names. Her parents would no longer call her "Prayer." Her neighbors would no longer call her "Flower-Blossom." Tariil would not again compare her to a tempting, enslaving pixie. Aristraana--wherever she now was--would refer to her no longer as her "Gem-girl." From now till the end of time, she was Aurelia of Rasillon. And as such, she immediately prepared to leave Rasillon and her old life behind, and embark on a lifelong quest for adventure, glory, wisdom, and the gods. Tariil vowed to remain always at her side.

Before she embarked on the odyssey of her life, Aurelia Ama'rasillon took a few days to wander the elfin woods, saying goodbye to every tree, every flower, every rock and tuft of grass that had been her intimates for over a century. She came to the bushes by the dark hollow where she'd first kissed Tariil, and begun their lifelong friendship. She came to the dead tree by the flowing stream where Aristraana and she had talked years before as sisters, years and years they'd shared the darkest secrets of their hearts, before Aristraana was stolen away by the Tlalaa. She forded the stream, and traversed the grassy, mossy distance to the pond where the Tlalaa had tempted her, and there sat down, thinking on everything she'd ever known, weeping for all she'd lost.

The inner life is something every elf--every_one_--must cultivate for herself. There are no guidelines, no maps or charts, for the exploration of that frontier. Some cultures do much to attempt to settle, even to colonize, that wilderness; the Laws of the Dwarves, the Religions of the Humans, the Endless Warfare of the Orcish peoples--these are offered by those cultures to define and to explain what Life is meant to be. For Elves, though, such "shortcuts" are thought dishonest, false, even silly. No one can tell another what the inner journey means; further, to do so would be to cheat the individual of a holy birthright--to know for oneself, to define for oneself, to live for oneself the life one alone must experience. Aurelia sat and meditated alone. She wondered what her life had meant, and what it was fated to mean. Opening to the universe around her, she vowed only to open more. For when you lost yourself, made yourself a hollow vessel for the gods to fill as only they could choose, this is when you really found yourself. Aurelia, just named, was most "Aurelia" when she was lost and nameless. This was how she'd learnt to use her magic, to stand aside within herself and allow the forces of the cosmos to flow fiery, freely through her. This is how she'd learnt to truly love Aristraana, Tariil, and the others she'd tasted; when she was trying to hold them, to possess them, she thought only of herself, and could not hope to truly know them; but when she let go of her ego, she found the flow of Love, like Magic, passed through her unobstructed, till all she was was the Love Itself.

Thinking on this, feeling it, Aurelia felt a transcendence there under the tree that was like a hundred sweet explosions in her soul; it was, she realized, her first taste of the Divine. Where had it come from? What was it? How could she put it into words?

At that point, she lost it.

She fell asleep under the tree, and drifted into a thrilling dreamscape. There, she saw dragons and deities, heavens and hells. There she saw Aurel, raised from the dead, holding a glowing tome in his hands, and handing it to her. The Codex. What truths were inscribed in its millennia-old pages of faerie skin, illuminated in gilded faerie blood?

These things faded, and she saw something she never thought she'd see again.

_Aristraana's face . . ._

"Aristraan'a?" she called after her. But between them stood the Tlalaa, ancient and terrible. And the Tlalaa was beautiful--more beautiful than Aurelia, more beautiful even than Aristraana. Tlalaa was Beauty Itself. And it made Aurelia wish to strike it and destroy it.

The Tlalaa laughed.

"Dost thou wish thy sister to come back thither unto thee?" it asked in lilting, Highest Elfin.

"Aye!" she exclaimed. "Bring her hence to me!!"

"I shall bring her back to thee," Tlalaa promised, "but only if thou agrees to suffer."

Aurelia prepared herself, and declared in a harsh and gutsy low tongue: "I'll do anything I have to, to get my friend back!!"

"I shall love thee, Aurel-ia Ama'rasillon, as I shall love thee. A cruel love--the way the Gods love, the way Life loves. We shall dance together, from this point onward. Thou shalt see the signs. Thou shalt know my love, and thou shalt submit to me. But if thou art brave, and thou taketh the stripes of my flails and the sting of my kisses, thou shalt live to know my Truth."

"I just want my Aristraan'a back!"

"Oh, that is but the first of my gifts, Child-of-Aurel, Flower-of-Rasillon. Before we both shall die, thou shalt receiveth many, many more. But in each gift, there is a curse."

Aurelia did not understand then. She did not care. All this was just double-talk, nonsense and madness. She knew the source of her anger at the Tlalaa. It was its Beauty, a beauty which seemed to eclipse her own. In its glare, she felt empty, worthless. But this was just the Tlalaa's magic, she told herself, just one of its illusions, like the gnomish illusionists who could make pebbles dance in the air, fuzzy lights fall from the sky, disguise their faces into shapes which, after the illusion faded, were simply their ordinary, mundane countenances, unremarkably themselves. Tlalaa, too, would lose its strength; its magic would someday fade. And then it would not be so beautiful anymore. This was Aurelia's great hope.

Tlalaa laughed again, a triumphant cackle.

And suddenly, Aurelia was wide awake. She felt she'd done something, come to some triumphal insight, which had defeated the Tlalaa. She'd bested the creature at its own game. But what the insight actually was, she could not remember. It was lost in her dream . . .

Aristraana stood before her suddenly, for the first time in nigh twenty years, Tlalaa's defeat winning her back. Aurelia laughed triumphantly and heard Aristraana's laughter returning as she faded fully back into the material plane. But the laughter was drowned in Tlalaa's laughter, ringing through the wood, echoing like shimmering glass, myriad shards, crashing through the vortex. Aurelia did not understand; why would _Tlalaa_ laugh, when it was Tlalaa who had lost?

Aristraana's laughter morphed into something different, something strained, hoarse, raspy. Aurelia saw her friend engulfed in shadow, curling over, falling into fits of spasmodic coughing and wheezing. Aurelia ran to her, splashing knee-deep in the brackish pond water, her arms outstretched to catch her as she fell through the portal, materializing fully into the forest. Her bones felt like brittle sticks in a rice paper wrapping. That was Aurelia's first feeling, before she'd really looked at her. Then, she noticed her hair, as her face lay buried in her breast, struggling for breath. It was almost completely white.

Lifting Aristraana's face to meet hers, she saw the effect of perhaps six or seven centuries creasing and scarring and rendering it the stark grey of a specter. Aristraana had been kept less than twenty years from Aurelia, in the Material Plane's time; but frozen in the Realm of the Fey, the Tlalaa had stolen nearly all the centuries of her life away.

This was why the Tlalaa laughed . . .

Aurelia brought Aristraana to the elders of Rasillon, the small cluster of low-perched tree houses in the central, most ancient tree of the oblong circle of the thorp. The elders did not "rule" Rasillon; no one did. But their wisdom was valued, just as Aurelia and Tariil and (until tonight) Aristraana were valued for their youthful vibrancy and grace. The elfin community had a place for all within it, the young, the old, all between. But the elders seemed to Aurelia that midnight to be the only ones to turn to in the community. If anyone knew how to deal with Aristraana's condition, if possible to reverse the aging (which Aurelia hoped and prayed was merely the effect of the Tlalaa's magic--a trick, an illusion, which could be dispelled), then it was the elders who would know how to do it.

The eldest of the elders was called Aust, also called Aristovix, as well as other names. Aust Aristovix Ne'Rasillon had been alive when even the other elders were young, had watched them grow from infants, had been to them all an older brother, uncle, lover, mentor, friend. Unlike the other elders, who kept one another company in the lower treehouses, Aristovix preferred to stay alone, keeping company with his many books and scrolls, his lyre, his weaving--as well as the many birds and other forest folk who flew or climbed or crept to his door. Aust was a gentle, friendly man, but also a trifle irascible if interrupted from his studies. Aurelia had caught him at just such a moment.

"Yes? Well? What is it, then?"

His clipped words preceded Aurelia's entering, sensing someone at his threshold. Aust was blind, nearly; but he had a well-developed "second sight," which could taste the colors and hear the heat of a person's aura even many yards away. It was he who had nurtured Aurelia's own sixth and seventh senses, advising her on how best to cultivate her sorcery when it began to develop in her--more than fifty years ago.

"Two of you? Well, then? What is it? It's very late, you know. You children should be asleep, dreaming of pretty satyrs to tempt and seduce, eh? Not bothering an old man."

"My apologies, my lord," Aurelia panted. Aristraana, dazed, leaned against her in the doorframe. "But I--"

"You do seem tired, Sh'elevu--that is who it is, yes? Tired, winded. Haven't slept at all, eh?--not for days and nights most probably."

"My apologies, my lord Aust. But I--_I need your help_!"

For the first time, the elder elf looked up from his book. His little house near the treetop was all shadow and debris--not kept well, allowed to somewhat return to the forest around it, just as he was gradually preparing to do. Vines, ivy, spider's webs, bird's nests, all made the shadowy inner sanctum fuzzy at the edges; a great, glassless skylight allowed the light of Corellon's Moon to illuminate what his flickering candles could not, and let in all the myriad winged creatures of the forest night. A pocket of light seemed to dwell around the old man only, his old stuffed, living-leaf-embroidered armchair, his little side table where sat the candles, a neglected bit of fabric, a cup and saucer, and an old tome bound in reddish-brown dragonhide.

Aurelia's eyes were wide in fear and pleading. The blind blue of his squinted with his second sight, his bald and wrinkled pate wrinkling further as he finally saw her. His face became at once kindly, concerned.

"Oh, dear one. What's wrong with your friend? Her aura is--very strange, now. I don't recognize--wait, then! Is it? Who--? No!"

"Yes, my lord! It's Aristraana! She's returned!! But, she's--she's--"

He dropped his reading and sprang up to help her. He was spry and agile, moving silently as a shadow amidst the shadows.

"Let's get her to a chair, Sh'elevu, m'dear. Here. There we are . . . I'll make her some strong tea. It feels to me as if she's been through quite a lot of late. As have you."

Aristovix Ne'Rasillon set his kettle to a soft boil on a greenish, magical flame, momentarily returning carrying a silver tray with three bowls of tea. He'd evidently forgotten he had one already on his end table.

The three sat in their stuffed armchairs, Aurelia pensive, wanting to spill everything in a splashing flood at her elder's feet, all her fears, her theories, her longings--all the different thoughts of Aristraana, who seemed too dazed even to respond to her or the old man, even though she was right there. It was the first time in nearly twenty years Aurelia had felt her flesh or heard her breathing! But now that flesh was withered, that breath shallow and labored. Where should she begin?

"Just, drink your tea, my dear," Aust told Aurelia. "Drink, my lady, slowly. Take a deep, clearing breath. And then . . . begin at the beginning, eh?"

Aurelia explained to her elder everything, from that vision years ago when Aristraana disappeared, through her own odd feelings of connection to her and to the Tlalaa, her dreams and nightmares over the years, to what had happened just that night. Aust weighed the situation very carefully. A running theme in the songs and literature of the elves, going back many thousands of years, was the fine line between what was thrilling and what was perilous in love. Tlalaa was among the many characters that recurred throughout these lyric and epic stories, the name derived from a distant language older even than the Highest Elfin--itself a language which many cultures acknowledged as the oldest spoken by humanoids (only Draconic, the tongue of the great and ancient Dragons, was said to be older). Tlalaa's charms were notorious, the siren call of the most wild and uncontrollable passions. Tlalaa's temptations were thought of as the one great tragic flaw of the elfish people, the embodiment of the risk of slavery and destruction that went with all that was alluring and rewarding in passion and lust.

After consulting some scrolls and tomes, whose magical elfish script could speak their meaning even to his blinded eyes, taking his time referencing both the real and the mythic in regard to the Fey, Aust concluded something about the nature of the planes and the nature of time.

He said:

"My dear ones, such fates as yours are the price we pay for magic in the cosmos. The Tlalaa, like all the Fey, exists in a relation to cosmic time which is almost independent of its flow; the Tlalaa comes close to being Immortal. Of course, Tlalaa's lovers are not. Time in different planes proceeds according to different, but parallel streams of progression. A person from the Material Plane, from our world of T'luria, can spend time in such dimensions as the Fey's Realm for but a split second--and return centuries later to our world, having not aged at all. But in that timeless realm, a person can also spend centuries of living, not aging at all in that plane; but when she returns to our world and time, the years she spent in that realm catch up to her all at once.

"Aristraana now has weathered the passage of years, taxing her frame, her heart, her blood, the energies of her aura. This is why she is so dazed now, Sh'elevu." [Aristraana was now fast asleep in the armchair, her breathing normalizing in depth and pace.] "Let her stay here with me for the next few days and nights. I shall attempt to heal her, wait on her needs, help her ease into her new, elderly body. I shall sing her healing songs, penned down in some of my ancient scrolls, play her soothing magical melodies on my lyre. . . . She shall come to comfort and equilibrium, Sh'elevu--this I vow to you. But, I'm afraid the passage of her years is irreversible. She is old, now. And, so she shall be, until her body fails and her spirit returns to the Isles of the Blest."

"Why can you not reverse the aging, my lord?"

"Because, my lady, Aristraana has lived her life--a whole lifetime in the Realm of the Fey. The Tlalaa did not 'steal' her years; she lived them all, to the fullest, presumably in the body of a youthful maiden in the misty Faerie Realm; Tlalaa's companion. What I shall be doing over the course of the next days and nights with her is to help her remember it all, to take the broken, blurring memories of her last six hundred years, and help her piece together a coherent narrative. Her story, her myth, shall be hers to discover and appreciate; and it shall help her reclaim her years, filling them with meaning, and thus lead her to value the life she's lived. The Tlalaa is cruel, a temptress and a trickster. But there must be eons of adventure Aristraana lived at the Tlalaa's side. Recalling them, making them her own, will win back what was apparently stolen--and allow Aristraana to benefit from the wisdom of her years, which, we all must accept, Sh'elevu, have passed inevitably away."

Aurelia bowed her head in a deep nod. She accepted the fate of her friend, and accepted her own fate at her side. Even though she did not fully understand or agree with these entwining fates.

Aristovix Ne'Rasillon nursed Aristraana for the next week and a half, singing to her, praying over her, invoking the airy spirit of the moon and the earthy spirit of the forest to channel their energies into his blessings upon her. Also, he talked with her for hours and hours, encouraging her to share her last six hundred years of experience in the Realm of the Fey. Gradually, Aristraana came to accept and even cherish her memories, her centuries-long love affair with her Tlala'a, torrid and turbulent; overall, good, very good memories they were.

By the time Aurelia came to call on Aust and Aristraana, she found the two of them had explored more than just verbal and magical spheres of communication; they'd also learnt to be companions in the deepest senses. Aust allowed them to be alone, so Aurelia could reconnect with her friend, twenty years distant from her, and more than six centuries. They had much to catch up on . . .

"So, my Kiir'a--if I may be permitted still to use such an intimacy," she smiled to her friend, bowing her head in a reverence for Aurelia that she'd never dared in the jealous days of their youth. There was no rivalry between them now; all that was past. Aristraana had not lost herself by losing her youth; rather, she'd gained a whole new character, a wiser, gentler one. Aurelia pondered her new, old friend, and accepted the way she said her name.

"My Lady A'ristraana," Aurelia smiled, bowing her head in turn.

The crafted, wizened features of her elder held her spellbound. Aristraana had indeed not wasted her last centuries in the Land of the Fey. She was strikingly beautiful now, wise and subtly powerful, like a crafted idol of the elder goddesses, in a way she as a younger lass could never have been. She'd learnt much, many epochs of lovemaking, from her love-hate lust with the Tlalaa and the Tlalaa's many other lovers. Aristraana regaled her with her adventures in that lost realm, beings she'd met, things she'd done. It was almost the dawn before she paused, and Aurelia minded not the tales and the telling, sitting delighted at the feet of her elder, and _learning_.

All Aristraana had learnt, she gave back now to her precious gemstone, her Kiir'a. The night faded into daylight, then passed again into night by the time Aurelia even knew the time had passed. Aurelia saw Aristraana, both young and old, ageless in shining, stellar firelight. She spoke to her in a language beyond elfish, beyond any earthly tongue. She told her all her secrets, taught her how to love, taught her how to channel her love into an energy beyond selfishness or serving. In the elegant language of the body and the soul, Aristraana spoke to Aurelia of six centuries of discovery, six centuries of transcendence; and when Aurelia awoke beside her ancient lover three days and nights later, they spoke of it again . . .

Aurelia had tasted of Love over the first century of her life; all of her self-discovery, all her beauty, had stemmed from her experience of love. The next era of her life, the era that goes on to this very day, was one in which she would taste love's opposite.

Aurelia Ama'rasillon was about to taste of War . . .

Chapter the Second: _Embarking_

The Orcs had raided some of the northerly settlements of the Elfish Forest, and a _sovyiil_ had been called amongst the frontier communities, an elf militia formed to deal with the incursions. A _sovyiil_, or "council," was no official body, but was called on the spur of the moment, and only on those occasions when they were absolutely necessary. Elves for countless centuries had been loath to centralize power under any "government." Certainly, there was Trefaldwyn, the greatest of elf cities, and the Elronin Dynasty there had been calling itself "emperors" for the last few millennia or so. But to Elves, two or three millennia was still but recent history, just two or three generations from living memory, and there were still many, in fact the vast majority of elves in the Great Forest, who still refused fealty to Trefaldwyn. Mostly, elves dealt with their defenses community by community, coordination between them of an autonomous, confederated nature. The _sovyiil_ was merely a temporary means of coordinating these efforts across a vast area, the many affected communities along the Frontier.

News had reached Rasillon only in the last week of the need for warriors to aid their brethren along the frontier, and mostly, volunteers formed themselves into small parties who traveled up there of their own accord. There were a few voices in the southerly thorps who called for a more general army to be formed, even talk of conscription. (The "Emperor" Elronin VI for his part had issued a call for such conscription, his edicts posted in parchment and vellum and wooden placards on trees throughout the Forest.) But mostly, these voices were ignored. Elves valued their freedom above all things; not even a threat to their lives could coax them from their independence. Besides, the highly developed and highly successful elfish arts of war, which had kept the Great Western Forests Elfish for over a hundred thousand years, excelled not in marching, standing-army warfare, but rather in small-squad guerrilla tactics. And though some of the northern communities were rumored to have chosen temporary "leaders" (electing them from amongst the rank-and-file villagers) with the power of fielding and commanding columns of soldiers, most of the volunteers based their strategy on their traditional small-group hit-and-run strike forces, based not a top-down leadership, however elected or temporary, but on mutual consensus. As Aurelia and Tariil were planning on striking out for the Northern Tundra anyway, to find the long lost Wizard's Vale and the Promisetown rumored to be either in or near it--the place where the Codex was rumored to lay hidden, the last place Aurel had been seen--they took the opportunity to form themselves into an affinity group of nine people, to lend their efforts to the fight.

Aristraana, now silvery and venerable, with centuries of living spent in the Realm of the Fey, was now accepted as an elder in the Rasillon community. She was too old, now, to join the war. So, with gentle kisses and embraces, she bade Aurelia and Tariil and their seven friends the luck of Fharlanghn, God of Travelers, God of the Crossroads, and told them she would keep a lamp lit for them in her tree house, awaiting their return.

Aurelia wanted to stay by her side. She'd loved her once as a younger sister; she loved her now as a grandmother. And of course, there was always their relation as tender lovers, tender comrades, something which now transcended the centuries. But duty called, and her duty was to the North. For the pride of Elves, for the love of the Forest and Mother Ehlonna, and for the honor of Corellon and all Elfish culture--as well as for the hatred of the Orcs and the memory of Aurel and his quest, which they may well have thwarted, slaying him and scattering his atoms to the ether—for all these reasons, Aurelia had to go. So, with one last deep and passionate kiss, she left Aristraana, and set out with Tariil and the mainly half-human crew of nine to their rendezvous in the Frontier.

As they traveled through the Forest over the weeks that followed, they saw the trees change from deciduous to coniferous and braced themselves as the air grew colder and blustery, seeing heavy snow drifts amidst the trees for the first time in their lives. Aurelia decided she was no fan of the cold, her traveler's gear packed most impractically, her clothing scant and spare. Her long, black boots went up to her thighs, and though they were worn for aesthetic reasons more than practical ones, they soon proved the most sensible thing she'd brought (besides her crossbow and magically-tipped quivers of arrows). Most of the things she'd packed were books and scrolls she could not read for the fading light, delicacies too light to fill her, Hobbit and Gnomish tobaccos she smoked too quickly and grew too dizzy with, and five bottles of choicest Elfin wine which quite nearly froze in the glass. They came upon other bands of elves, gathering from all corners of the vast Forest over those days, and converged with more than a few in common camps as the weary winter twilights gave way to long, bitter nights. But so far, they'd seen no fighting.

Even in what other races would consider dire and somber situations, like being in a military encampment on the eve of war, Elves always had time for song, for poetry, for love. Aurelia shared all these things with all the relish of youthful adventure. Before she'd even made it to her destination, that northerly circle of villages on the Frontier, she'd drained all five bottles of wine--two in a single night! The last bottle was shared on the last night, when they were less than twenty miles from the front. There, in the dying embers of the evening's fire, when the waning crescent moon was risen to its fullest prominence, but an hour before the dawn, a bard was still singing for a few sleepy listeners, half-singing, half-whispering an epic passed down from the Ancient Times, with a listener or two singing sleepy verses along with her, passages long known to them from elfin folklore. Aurelia had recited a verse or two earlier in the evening, laughingly joining her voice to the bard's and a score of others, laughing because of how horrendous her singing voice sounded to her. She could not carry a tune to save her life! Even when she'd sung her own name in Declaration but a month before, she'd sung softly, belting out only her own name above a normal speaking voice.

But she'd wanted to share the poetry that evening, for the epic was hers as much as anyone else's, as much as the bard's or her lyre-playing hobbit accompanist or even its unknown authors, lost in antiquity. Every recitation from the most ancient epochs till the present moment had been differently sung, changed ever so slightly by each bard who ever sang it, and added to by every hearer who joined in its singing. Aurelia's cracked, off-key rendering of an inexpertly remembered verse had changed it forever; for in the Elfish way, a "poem"--even an epic like this one, which existed in written form in elfish communities throughout the Continent--was not considered words alone. The elves have many words, of course, for "poem" and "poetry," as they have many words for _everything_--_especially _for matters of the arts. But no word for "poem" or "poetry" means simply _poem_ as it is denoted in the Common tongue. Every word for it, in every context, in any of the many categories of the vast wealth of literature of the Elfin race, means words _in conjunction _with activity. There are poems which are sung, poems which are performed, poems which are "written" on the spot by however many people are in hearing of them. A poem, at the very least, must be said aloud by the reader in order to be truly realized as a poem. On the paper, it is nothing, no matter how beautiful or important. Poetry is the act of reciting it, or performing it, or creating it; this is why a great poem is said by the elves to be a living thing, alive with the life of all those who engage in it. The same principle applies to all the elfish arts, from the arts of poetry and music and tapestry to the arts of war and the arts of love. Ideally, it applies to everything an elf does, in matters great and matters small, throughout her long life.

Only Dwarves wrote for the sake of writing--and it was no wonder, Aurelia thought, that Dwarves were so stodgy and uncreative. They strove not for living art, but for the dead, unchanging "art" of stone tablets, hidden underground for a hundred thousand years. They excelled not in poetry, but in long, dry histories, in ponderous biographies of their "great heroes," and in lifeless technical manuals. These last were the preferred form of late, and using the same systematic, schematic style, they subjected all things in life to the same exacting methodology, from engineering and architecture to etiquette and ritual to the arts (or "sciences") of magic. Even sexuality was treated in this dry, dead way. The elves discovered sexuality as a sensuous vision, and pursued it as they chose, changing genders and behaviors and relational forms joyfully throughout their lives; it was a laughingstock amongst them to learn that Dwarfish children would be given "how-to" books on sex when they came to puberty, so they could learn what was "acceptable" and what was not. Gender amongst the dwarves was said to be a set binary; heterosexual, monogamous, lifelong "marriage" the form of sexuality mandated in nearly every case. Such strictures might have frightened the fluidly free elves, but mostly, they just made them laugh and pity.

Dwarf histories, biographies, and manuals changed very little over the generations. Dwarves were known to copy out old tomes word for word, letter for letter, changing nothing. It was said that the arts of "copying" were more respected even than the arts of composition, with the long line of copiers of the runic texts recorded beside the name of the original author, many times in larger script. A tome came to be respected not so much for its content or quality, but for its age; a truly good volume was said by the dwarves to be one of at least five "littorbruuns"--a dwarfish word meaning, roughly, "editions." Such obedience to tradition for tradition's sake was the dwarves' most notorious cultural trait. Their ancestors were more than remembered; their dead weight was actually a palpable presence in their lives, as if their will was considered equal, or even superior, to the will of the living. With every aspect of their lives, the dwarves strove to be as stone statues, unchanging, enduring.

And a dwarf bard? The thought was a jest.

No wonder, Aurelia thought, the dwarves had been the ones to develop "science" and "technology" so far in the last few centuries, building their iron roads of rails crisscrossing the Continent, constructing their steam-power engines that could drag hundreds of tons of cargo thousands of miles over the land. Dwarf genius was in the practical, creative only in the most dead, mechanical ways. Aurelia heard talk of them that last night in the camp, their slow but deliberate expansion across the Continent, which many elves found increasingly threatening. Would they go to war one day against the elves? And with their admittedly powerful (the elves dared not say "superior") weaponry, would they not one day overrun the elves, burning down their Great Forests, reducing the survivors to ignominious slavery?

But they were many years from reaching the Western Forest with their rails, the conversations chuckled in renewed confidence as the last of the potent Elfin Wine was passed around. This was true, even if some elves in Trefaldwyn were engaging in business dealings with the dwarves to tear down vast sections of the Forest to build a railway from Trefaldwyn all the way to the Dwarfish capitol of Kharahdjo, as it was sometimes rumored. Surely, the collaboration of some of their own countrymen in Trefaldwyn was angering and frightening, and for the better part of an hour, the conversations round the campfire revolved round debate and condemnation of these quislings, and a renewed hatred for dwarvenkind in general. But the dwarves were mostly mentioned that night to laugh at them for the former reasons, and it was in this mocking spirit that the fears, brought up briefly, were swiftly dismissed. Elves loved living, loved living arts and living love. If the Dwarves were ever to march against them, in their rigid columns, those columns would be utterly routed as soon as they dared enter the Forest, picked off like ducks in a row by skillful elfin archers, hidden in the brush and the treetops. Small group, guerrilla-style, anarchic warfare was superior to the dumb, follow-the-leader plodding along of their potential enemies from the East. The Elves were superior to the Dwarves, in all that really mattered.

This is what the elves all agreed that night.

Of course, even the dwarves were vastly superior to the orcs, whose filthy legions the elves faced on the morrow. Dwarves had a boring, lifeless, terrible culture. But Orcs did not have a culture at all. Dwarves did not read poetry, but at least they could read. Orcs had no literature beyond the terse profanities they occasionally and haphazardly scrawled in runic graffiti--even the runes borrowed from the dwarves, as they had no script of their own. The Orcs had no music besides their shrill war whistles and bone rattlers, had no prayers besides chants of revenge. They had no kindness, no beauty; they culled any who showed kindness or beauty from their ranks at birth, or shortly thereafter. The very beasts had more culture than they. For who could tell whether a badger, or a bird, or a bumblebee did not secretly sing to its young, think its thoughts, honor its gods and goddesses, display its loveliness to others to attract a mate? Orcs had a language, but they only expressed hate and cruelty with it. Orcs had a religion, but it was to worship ugliness, glorying in rape and bloodshed, spurring them always to conquest and atrocity. Dwarves might have been opposite to the Elves in many ways, but the Orcs were actually a _degeneration_ of the elves. A line of elfish thought actually saw elves and orcs as having a common ancestor, way back before the most ancient of the Ancient Times, and for whatever evil reasons, the line that became the orcs had been corrupted into the monstrous things they were today.

This was the kernel of the part of the epic that was sung that night in a far corner of the camp, the recounting of the wars between the races, going back before earthly memory. _The Origin_, attributed to a group of poets who lived before the ancient treetop city of Trefaldwyn had even risen, whose own grandparents probably hailed from the Isles of the Blessed beyond the Western Sea. A group of warriors and poetesses, each of both callings, as well as many others, as the well-rounded, dynamic elves have always been. They spoke of the primal battle before the beginning of time, between the aboriginal elf and the aboriginal orc, who became the immortal gods of these races. Corellon, who became the Elfin God of the Moon, repelled the attack of Gruu-umsh, his ugly, malformed cousin, who so lusted for power that He became this lust, ascending to the pantheon as the Orcish God of War. Gruu-umsh, jealous of Corellon's beauty, sliced at Him with his evilly magical war-axe (though some legends say it was a bone or tooth of some lost dinosaur creature or long-extinct dragon, and some others say He used His own tooth, or claw). From the drops of blood Corellon spilt arose the first elves, who were all as beautiful as Corellon, and worshiped Him forever. Corellon prevailed in this battle, even though the sneaky Gruu-umsh struck first, and claimed His ugly cousin's left eye with His elegant elfish rapier. Half-blind forever, Gruu-umsh ran far away to the very edge of the world, the inhospitable Northern Tundra, where the ugliest, most degenerated of the elves were exiled many centuries later by those who still retained their beauty, their kindness, their bravery. These degenerate elves live there to this day, worshiping their ugly, mean and cowardly Master.

The bard was tiring, and all but one of her audience had drifted to slumber. Her lyrist had long turned in. Such epics as she told could take many nights to tell in their entirety, and a good bard would know at least a few of the great epics--each of which would take volumes to pen down--entirely by heart. Most bards were self-taught, those souls who as children took to reading, then reciting, then eventually adding their own verses to the epics, which thereafter became part of the Elfish Canon. Truly gifted bards also would write lyric poetry, songs and ballads; and as they grew into their prime, these bards even composed full-scale epics all their own. The Epic Age was still very much alive in the Elfish Forests. The bard who sang that night was in fact penning her own, her sleepy aqua eyes focusing on the long scroll she held before her, if only in her imagination, her eyes following the right-to-left flowery script of Old High Elfin she burned into mystic parchment in the last hour of waking.

"What do you call it, my lady?" Aurelia asked her, snuggling against her warmth under a common blanket after the last of her audience finally turned in, and she'd breathed her prayer of conclusion. She was an older elfin lady, not ancient as Aristraana, but more than in the prime of her middle age. Her hair had just a trace of silver amidst the black, her aqua eyes seeming to grey in the same manner. Her figure was long and lean, handsome more than pretty, her bosom very slight and flattened as if in a bodice, though she wore loosely flowing garments, a gown of pastel blues inlaid with sapphires. Aurelia thought she would give the gift of her youth to this woman, old enough to be her mother. She smelled faintly of lilacs, mingling with vanilla, and Aurelia breathed her own peppery scent into hers as their bodies entwined.

"Me poem?" she smiled to the pretty lass curling beside her. "Me epic?"

She had a coastal accent, something humanish in the style of her inflections, a rustic, yet seafaring tone. "'Tis called _The Ending_."

"Why do you call it such?"

"'Methinks 'tis me thoughts on it, m'lady. The End of all this."

"The end of the world?"

"Ha ha! Thee catch'd it! 'Tis a poem of Vision, and of Hope. But 'tis, too, a song of Fear."

Aurelia boldly lay her head on the older woman's sinuous arm, her tongue flittering a little at a worn seam in her gown. "Tell me," she smiled in gentle daring, "of the _fear_ . . ."

"Ha! Alright, me elfchild. Just, promise me you shan't cry for 'mommy,' eh?"

And she laid out her Vision of the future, and the not so distant one. Inspired by the fears in the Forests of late--the possible war with the Dwarves, the actual war with the Orcs, the increasingly unsettling machinations of Trefaldwyn, the courtly intrigues of the great rival noble houses and the bolder and bolder designs of the Elronins on tyranny--this poetess had authored an apocalypse. The Gods, she smiled, would one day go mad; their peoples would be maddened in turn; the madness would compel them--all the sentient races of the world--into a Final War; and no one, not god, not mortal, not a single tree in the vast Elfish Forest, would be left standing by its End.

After singing Aurelia a few quatrains, and more than a few couplets, all searing with doomed eloquence and terrifying imagery, she cackled like an old witch, and regarded her young friend, wondering in proud indifference if she'd scared away the chance of love that night. Aurelia looked up at her, and saw something weirdly demonic in her face, the sharp black slants of her eyebrows, her saber-like beak of a nose, the cruel curl of her lips as she cackled. The way the last light of the fire's dying embers cast her visage heightened the effect, to the point where Aurelia was momentarily afraid of her. She moved instinctively away, but the woman pulled her face to hers and shot a violent tongue in her mouth. The tongue was long and pointed, choking her with a repulsive, ashy brimstone taste.

Aurelia pulled away from the creature, struggling to break free of her, but was compelled to remain in the burning kiss, her hair locked in a steely grip. After what seemed many seconds, the poetess released her, smiling cryptically.

"You still want these old bones, little girl?" she cackled, and seemed impossibly old, ancient as the burning pits of Hell.

Before Aurelia could say anything, the woman vanished, leaving behind nothing but a faint tang of sulfur. Aurelia cast off the blanket, and ran across the clearing. Tariil and the others slept soundly; the fire was nearly dead; nothing stirred but the wind and the wintry birdcalls of dawn. She looked up at the moon. It was bloody-gold in color as it set into the horizon. Everything felt eerie, macabre.

She looked at the lyrist, the little hobbit fellow who wore elfin greens and a sash of crimson. He was sleeping soundly, a long pipe still dangling from his sleepy grip. Aurelia thought to wake him then, to query where this bard had come from, how long he'd been traveling with her, where they'd met. But it all seemed absurd. Still out of sorts, her head reeling from the wine and the hobbit-tobacco and the entrancing verses still ringing in her ears, that tongue which had bent them, and bent _her_, leaving an unsettling, ashen taste in her mouth she could not spit away, she curled beside Tariil and another half-human boy, and tried to sleep.

Chapter the Third: _The First Battle_

Aurelia, Tariil, and the seven others in their party came to the first of the circle of villages along the Frontier to see a smoldering ruin. No trace of the _sovyiil_ was to be seen, no elfish army, no elves at all left alive. The clearing that had been the village's center was scorched earth, and all the surrounding trees had been rent from the ground and left charred and dead. All the tree houses were ashes, a few of the beams still glowing red under the embers. What was worst of all, though, was a great circle of pikes surrounding what had been the village center; impaled upon each was the rotting head of every warrior, man and woman, who had died defending this ground, left as a warning to all those who passed this way.

"Those bastards," Tariil and others rasped, gritting their teeth, their rage too great to employ orcish curse words, as was the custom of many peoples over the Continent. None from Rasillon remembered such sights, such rage against their kind. No orcs had ever penetrated the Forest down that far south in ages, and these young people were not veterans of any such wars to the north. Ancient hatreds welled up in their green blood, then, and ancient fears kindled which burned despite the rage. There is something inexpressible about seeing one's own countryman--one's brother, one's sister--decapitated, rotting on a pike. In the stench of death mingling with the surreally pastoral scents of the earth and the pine needles, another odor hung heavy here.

"You smell that?" Tariil sniffed fiercely. "It is the stink of the orcs . . ."

Aurelia cupped her nose and nearly wretched. Why would they do this? Why would anyone? Could anybody really hate that much? For the first time in her life, Aurelia truly knew what it was to be despised; and, swallowing, she resolved to despise in return.

"Let us go," she said softly, bitterly, "and show those degenerated mongrels what is meant by Elf Vengeance."

"Aye!" called a few, and the rest called "AYE!!"

Intoning a prayer to Corellon, who was their God not only for music and dancing and poetry, but for the fiercest acts of War, and drawing strength from Ehlonna and from the Spirit of Her Forest, the elves split apart into phalanxes of two or three, and stalked through the woods as if on the trail of some beast of prey. But not as on the Hunt, in which elves would dance with their quarry, feel them dance, make themselves one with their energy, and strike as but a final coda in the Song of the Chase, thereafter to offer a banquet of the venison to the fallen deer as if to the most honored guest. No. Now there was no love for the prey, no honoring of its beauty, nor less any gratitude to be felt for letting the hunters kill it. Now, there was only icy hate, a bloodlust that denied their quarry any soul, as if the dirt beneath their stalking feet had more honor, more love in their eyes. Aurelia wanted to pay the monsters back for their hatreds of her, for their unspeakable crimes against her kind--not only just now, but all the crimes these monsters' fathers had ever committed against her mothers--going back since the two lines split. Tariil and not a few others saw visions of the orcs' own ugly heads impaled on pikes, though elves never performed such ugly dismemberment of their enemies. Tariil told a comrade or two of his vision, and there was hot assent: leave the orcs' ugly heads on rotten sharpened sticks, to freeze into perennial grimaces of agony on their own tundra plain! All wanted to see black blood everywhere, the filthy humor of corruption incarnate, the blood of He Who Sliced Corellon--from time immemorial, their bloods had burned with this lust to see the other's spilt.

Aurelia relished, cherished this hatred, feeling it an energy previously unknown to her, yet imbibing it deep like some deliciously burning soma. She liked it--she _loved _it!!! She would rip out the left eye of every orc bastard she could slay, making of those ugly, dead faces mocking tribute to their hateful God!

Other villages in the Frontier circle were similarly horrific. Smoldering ruins, rotting, tortured elfish visages, impaled and swarming with tundra-flies. Their green blood burned verdant in the cold as if the sun-baked forest canopy in highest summer. At each ruined village, they found other elves arriving on the scene as repulsed and enraged as they were, shared with them prayers to Corellon and Ehlonna for revenge, and consigned the remains of the fallen to a decent if hasty bonfire burial.

By the time they crossed over the Frontier, coming out of the Forest for the first time in their lives, and saw a ponderous mountain range standing in their way of the white-capped tundra looming beyond, the Elves were an army in truth. Hundreds converged till they were thickly thousands. There was no singing or dancing, now. But there were embraces, kisses, and shared tears of rage. Bonding as Elves, invoking the old tradition of drawing drops of their green blood into common chalices from which they then drank together, in toast to elfin bravery and elfin pride, they drew strength from their common sanguine life-force. The great army scattered once again into phalanxes, and within hours had scouted ahead, finding and fording a quarter-mile-wide, ice-strewn river cutting through a mountain pass veering westward to the ocean beyond the horizon, one of the only breaks in the virtual wall the impenetrable mountains formed. Wading through the shallows, little party by little party, the Elfish Army followed the river for a day and a night through the mountain pass, till they'd crossed finally into the Tundra proper.

For another day and night, the elves trekked north, seeing no barbarians to dispatch amidst the rocks and taiga grasses and snowy glacial valleys. The sun was waning earlier and earlier as they penetrated further, till at last it seemed but a murky twilight always. Some older elves had been on expeditions up into the Tundra before, during the Elf-Orc Wars of generations past, and informed their younger comrades that T'luria was not actually a "plane" so much as a _sphere_. This orb drew one further from the sun as one ascended it; so, going north to the point where there was no more "north" to go, would lead eventually to a place where the sun was _always _present--or, _never so_. There would come a time, an elderly, martial man in the tight olive tunic of the Trefaldwyn Elite Corps said, when all would be night, all darkness--for well nigh a year!

But that time was months away. And this expedition would be over long before then. In hindsight, thinking it would be possible to know which orc bands had done the crimes against their villages, to punish the true culprits and not exact revenge upon the innocent, was dubious at best. There were those orc bands which rarely or never attacked the elves unless they themselves were attacked, many, many of them wandering this frozen plain. But the elves in this army did not concern themselves with such distinctions. There was no way of knowing _which _orcs they wanted to slaughter; so, they looked for _any_--and slaughtered them all with the same genocidal gusto.

The army agreed to move in three, loose columns, each separated by at least a half-mile, barely in sight of one another on the twilit, windswept plain. The middle column was the thickest, with the majority of the elves' force deployed there. The point of their formation was to come upon orc settlements or wandering orc bands in between the columns, then to close in like pincers, annihilating all between. Orcish children's fate was debated, even on the march; some said strident things about how we should not, in fighting orcs, become them--thus we cannot kill the truly innocent along with the guilty. But what should we do with these little orclings? others queried with equal stridency. We elves do not take slaves, and we cannot raise them as our own. What are they, anyway, but little degenerated mongrels, who, if left alive, shall only grow up to take the lives of _our children_ when they come to their early majority? Leave them to die in the tundra, and we would be crueler than the orcs; better to dispatch them quickly then, painlessly; then we shall have stayed true to our honorable Elfish way.

Besides, did not these monsters slaughter little ones, too? Ours--_and their own_?

People knew, or at least suspected, that not every villager in the frontier circle had been decapitated and impaled on a pike. A simple count sufficed against that notion, and the elves who hailed from villages nearby could recognize the faces, knew some were missing. Most heads had belonged to warriors, men, women, and others of fighting age. The old people, too, had been slaughtered thusly. A segment, though, were missing. Had they escaped into the woods? Had they been dragged away as slaves? Did the monsters feast upon them, as if they were merest mutton to fill their bellies??

No one knew. But when the first hapless barbaric orcs were found wandering the tundra, justice was sharp and swift. Flotillas of arrows from longbows and crossbows crisscrossed the plain between the columns, leaving many for dead. Those who lingered were charged and assaulted hand-to-hand, the clash of scimitars and rapiers against sticks and stone-headed morningstars and crude maces keeping the battles going for several hours. But in the end, the elves prevailed with very few losses. And the foray continued.

Aurelia's expertise with the crossbow, unequaled by any in her small party and a match for all but the most veteran of the columns, had slain at least fifteen orcs in the first skirmishes. She found it a cold fire she shot at them, watching them fall from a distance, delighting particularly in one young orc warrior she got right through the neck. She watched him stagger and struggle to pull her bolt from his neck, his black blood splattering everywhere, and chuckled at how foolish he looked as he finally fell--like a ragdoll, she giggled, trying to be a stick-puppet! But the cold fire warmed to a queerer feeling after the battles, when she contemplated it in camp the third night on the tundra. A paranoia took her thoughts: had this cold, evil feeling, _relishing _the coldness, the evil, been implanted in her with the sharp intrusion of that demon's brimstone tongue in her mouth? Had that evil woman implanted this lust for black blood, a lust she'd never known before, but now reveled in? Surely, she knew someday she would fight, and kill, and that horrid sight in the first village she'd come to more than justified the drama she enacted now. But the _coldness, _the _relishing _of it--this she'd never suspected in herself. She'd always thought herself a pacific soul, one shrinking from war even as she excelled in its arts. Perhaps this lust for battle was akin to the lust of the Tlalaa, that forbidden but tantalizing lust which made Aristraana want to punish the Tlalaa for tricking her, for humiliating her and stealing most of her life away. And the games she'd played, coyly, cruelly teasing Tariil and Aristraana and the others before she'd grown into a greater maturity and simply gave herself to love; was this cold, controlling lust so dissimilar?

Aurelia laughed. She roared with laughter. And she was not alone. Killing in battle was akin to losing one's virginity; and now, as then, she found this more adult lust infinitely more satisfying than all the childish playacting preceding it. She cared not finally from whence all this lust for black blood came. She hated these orcish creatures. She hated them as surely as they hated her. She would see them suffer.

After nearly two weeks on the tundra, with very little but the most hapless victims for their war-lusts, the elves decided the point had been made. Their supplies were running thin, and the cold clime had already delivered more than a few to sickness. Cutting their losses, which were few, they decided to trek back to the Forests, to celebrate a victory--some four hundred orcish bodies lay dead, cold-rotting on the tundra; less than two dozen elves of two or three thousand had fallen. They marched back toward the mountain pass, singing elfish songs of victory, penning new verses to the age-old epics of eternal battle.

This is when they understood the orcs were not as stupid as they had thought.

When they were in sight of the mountains, heading back home, the elves saw something which made their green blood run thin. There, from one wall of the mountain pass to the other, blocking the river entirely, was a force of at least twice their number. Orcs, half-orcs, and a scattering of orclike barbarian humans--five or six thousand if one. Where had they all come from? Had they been behind them all along?

There was no time to wonder on this further. From the valley, and from the foothills of the mountains on both sides, volleys upon volleys of spears came raining down on the elfish forces, which scattered into confusion. There was nowhere to go, though, but back into the forbidding tundra. A grim realization came upon them as they ran helter-skelter and desperately fought for their lives: they had been _let _in, _allowed _to pass those four or five weeks ago--all this, just so that they could be trapped here now.

The hapless victims of the elves' rage had been left like bait for a trap. The orcs did not value life so dearly as their adversaries; their chieftains, who made a rough, temporary alliance to reap the plunder of the northern elves, had left a few isolated bands of their own to die, just so the elves would come back, weakened, hungry, and prematurely satisfied.

_How could we have been so blind??_

Out of their element, in foreign, hostile terrain, and mostly utterly inexperienced in actual warfare, the young elves and half-elves rallied valiantly to save themselves. But that old man of the Trefaldwyn Elite Corps had a point, if appreciated far, far too late. The Elves' style of fighting might well have worked in the Forest, with cover, in familiar terrain. But here, organization was sadly lacking. The Orcs, even the youngest and least experienced, knew war as their breath and life. The Tundra was perennially a battlefield. In the gentle forests of Ehlonna, with its song, and its wine, and its idyllic sensuality, battles on this scale were all but unknown. How could an untested, essentially peaceful force prevail against a crueler, war-scarred army of vastly superior numbers, on their own ground, even if the latter had the most primitive weapons in comparison to their adversaries?

Aurelia lost most of her party in seconds, diving behind some thick tufts of long grass, and expertly picking off some of the orcish positions in the foothills above. Tariil she heard, but could not see. It was every elf for herself, now--a battle which the elves, after all, more than preferred to fight. The battle raged on till nightfall, and the elves repelled many thrusts of orcish columns. But the main force of the orcs were prepared simply to sit, and wait. The elves would eventually starve, freeze, or die of thirst. Either that, or they would have to plunge headlong into the horde, to meet their certain doom. Or, they would have to _surrender_ . . .

The cold fire in Aurelia's blood burned for hours. She dodged many spears, tipped with poison, tipped with fire. But eventually, even the tufts of grass of her cover had burnt away, some group of orcish bastards on a hill behind a rock targeting her particularly. She did not want to die. She had just begun to live. The Codex, Aurel's legacy, lay somewhere far away; and now, it seemed, she would never find it. That weighed her down even more than the fear of death itself. The very purpose she'd chosen, that her whole family line and fate itself seemed to have chosen for her, was going to go forever unrealized. She had to fight this despair, along with the animal fear of death, along with the waning of her strength as she grew tired and hungry and a new snowstorm darkened the horizon.

_O Corellon! O Ehlonna! Let me survive this!! Let me live to see tomorrow!!!_

Then, everything began to fade. She'd been hit, a poison dart in her leg as she'd run from her lost cover to a new position. As she strained in the hail of spears to remove it, she realized with sick dread that it was a sleepy poison. She would be left to die.

Or, worse, to be _captured_ . . .


End file.
